Photo Credit: Zack Hill
It is no secret that the NHL has moved into a phase where young talent is extremely sought after and older players are expendable. The top five players in the league are all are 26 or younger and under team control for a long time. Those players are Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Auston Matthews, Nathan MacKinnon, and Cale Makar. McDavid has been the best player since he was 20. Matthews scored four goals in his NHL debut and has led the Maple Leafs from the basement to the playoffs in almost every year he has been a pro. MacKinnon has been a three-time all-star and has powered the Avalanche to the top of the Western Conference every year. Draisaitl is overlooked because he plays with McDavid but he himself is having a great start to his career winning the Hart, Ted Lindsay, and Art Ross trophies all in the same year. Makar has earned himself a huge contract extension with the Avalanche worth $54 million over six years and has multiple Norris trophies coming his way, maybe as soon as this season.
What am I getting at with this? To be successful, you need to find elite talent and develop it. The Flyers have neither found elite talent nor developed any of their young players into elite talents. They had a shot at drafting Cale Makar and took Nolan Patrick over him. Patrick is now in Vegas and never made a significant mark in Philadelphia. To be fair, the selection of Patrick over Makar was made by former Flyers’ GM Ron Hextall against the advice of his scouts. More recently, the Flyers were in on and very much had a chance at acquiring now Vegas Golden Knight, Jack Eichel. When it was first reported that Buffalo was looking for multiple picks, multiple prospects, and even a young roster player, it was fair to watch teams sit out the sweepstakes. As time went on, and Eichel held out (still needing to undergo back surgery), the price dropped. It dropped all the way to Peyton Krebs, Alex Tuch, a protected pick in the first round in 2022, and a second-rounder in 2023, with Vegas also getting a third-round pick. Sure, Eichel needed surgery and would not play until February or March. An offer from the Flyers should have been one of Konecny, Lindblom, or Sanheim, one of Frost, Foerster, or York, and matched the draft picks. It would hurt losing the draft picks and the young players but that leaves you with Jack Eichel, Sean Couturier, Kevin Hayes, and Scott Laughton down the middle. Pretty good center depth right?
It is baffling that Chuck Fletcher sat out the Eichel drama all summer and all season long after trading for Cam Atkinson, Ryan Ellis, and Rasmus Ristoleinen. These moves came with the signings of Keith Yandle, Martin Jones, and the extension of Couturier. These moves signaled that the Flyers were “all-in” on the 2021-2022 season. If they were truly going for it, Eichel would have been a Flyer long ago. Bringing him in might not change the fact the team is going nowhere this year but it sends a message to the rest of the organization that this is not a rebuild, it is a retool and we expect to be a top-flight team next season. Instead, we sit here with three of the top six forwards on IR, the biggest acquisition of the summer has played four games and used for memes on Twitter, and there has already been a coaching change. Not great.
For there to be any direction in a franchise, there has to be structure. The structure the Flyers currently have is weak. The leadership from the front office is weak for sitting on their hands instead of getting a top-10 player in the league. The coaching staff is becoming a revolving door with interim coaches coming in and out due to COVID-19 protocols. The current active roster is made up of old veterans trying to carry the team and young players that have been massive disappointments developmentally. Something has to give, and that something should be the entire coaching staff and player development staff.
At this rate, the Flyers are going to be picking in the top-10 of the 2022 draft with the strong possibility of being in the top five. The front office needs to identify game-changing players who can make a significant impact in the NHL in the future. The approach of taking safe two-way players in every round has yielded the Flyers with Travis Konecny, Joel Farabee, Ivan Provorov, Morgan Frost, and Travis Sanheim. None of those players are bad players but they were the same kind of pick that has also given the Flyers Nolan Patrick, Jay O’Brien, German Rubstov, and Pascal Laberge. I understand not wanting to swing for the fences and striking out completely but these picks are like squaring around to bunt with no one on and two outs, it’s a coward’s way out. Instead of Sanheim, they could have gone with David Pastrnak. Ever heard of him? If not, he scores three goals against the Flyers every time they play. Instead of Patrick, they could have taken Makar. Instead of Konecny, Sebastian Aho was available. Jay O’Brien is one of three players that was picked in the first round in 2018 that still has not played an NHL game yet. He was taken at 19th overall and the other two are Filip Johansen (24-MIN) and Dominik Bokk (25-STL). The 2015 draft class was absolutely loaded. The Flyers were extremely lucky to have two picks in the first round. They should have taken Zach Werenski (who also earned himself a huge contract) if they were looking for defense at seven.
It would be excusable if these safe picks worked out and developed into reliable two-way players that lived up to their draft position but they have not. Provorov started his career looking like a future Norris contender and now there are questions if he is even a top-pair defenseman. Konecny looked like he could be the sniper the Flyers have been looking for since Jeff Carter, Danny Briere, and Simon Gagne were shipped away but has regressed all the way to seven goals in the first 38 games this season, including a 20 game streak without a goal. Sanheim had been lauded as a big, physical defenseman with a very high offensive upside. While he is big, he is not physical. Offensively, he does not put up many numbers, which is not the end of the world for a second-pair defenseman, but he does not make up for it with strong defensive play either. On a contender, Sanheim is a bottom pair defenseman with no special teams time. Farabee looks like one of the better players from the 2018 class which is a plus considering it was a weaker class, but each of the players above all looked like legit players who could make big impacts on contending teams in their first three seasons as well. It was a bit of a risk giving him that contract extension, especially after only playing 107 career NHL games.
Ultimately, it is hard to find elite talent in drafts, especially later in the draft. To keep up with the league’s focus shifting to youth, your youth has to develop at a rate the rest of the league’s youth is as well, or quicker. Finding productive veterans helps and keeping leaders on the team like Couturier and Giroux is great, but the Flyers’ lack of star power coming from young players is hurting them the most and keeping them in the basement of the NHL.
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